Gnostic texts

Barnstone, Willis and Marvin Meyer, eds.The Gnostic bible Gnostic texts of mystical wisdom from the Ancient and Medieval Worlds - Pagan, Jewish, Christian, Mandaean, Manichaean, Islamic, and Cathar. Shambhala, 2003. 860p. 

To begin to answer this question, we can first divide Christian Gnostic texts from the pagan Hermetica, and consider if the Hermetic corpus might reveal a discrete set of theoretical responses to the cosmos. In so doing, we can gain a broader sense of the way that heimarmene, as a concept, was deployed across a range of Hermetic treatises. 

Foerster, Werner, ed. Gnosis A Selection of Gnostic Texts. 2 vols. Translated by R. McL. Wilson. Oxford Clarendon, 1974. 

Parrot, Douglas M. Evidence of Religious Syncretism in Gnostic Texts from Nag Hammadi. In Religious Syncretism in Antiquity, edited by B.A. Pearson, 173-189. Missoula, MO Scholars Press, 1975. 

The Hermetic Tradition Represents a Non-Christian Lineage of Hellenistic Gnosticism. The Central Texts of the Tradition, the Corpus Hermeticum Were Lost to the West in Classical Times. Their Rediscovery and Translation During the Late-Fifteenth Century by the Renaissance Court of Cosimo De Medici, Provided a Seminal Force in the Development of Renaissance Thought and Culture. This Translation by G.R.S. Mead Shares 13 of the 18 Tracts. (Retranslated to the Modem by Frater Ego Esse, SOT A). 

In one of the earlier lessons we have a metaphysical interpretation of this text, but we desire to say that, like all similar texts, it is capable of several different interpretations and, since the Apocalypse bears unmistakable evidence of having been written by a Gnostic, we feel justified in viewing this particular text hermetically. 

The well-informed reader would know how to discern the beautiful esotericism hidden beneath the banal text of these pasWise. We shall end them with a quotation an extract from a Gnostic apocrypha of the second century ... 

See the similar assessment of Dunderberg, Beyond Gnosticism 181-185, using Tripartite Tractate 109 1-5 as a core text. 

The answers the texts themselves yield furnish a radically different picture of cosmology and cosmic attitudes —if indeed one were to accept that any such thing existed—than that which my esteemed predecessors asserted. I see, above all, few indications that any Gnostic group suffered the burden of enslavement to Fate, at least in any absolute and enduring sense. Consistently in our sources, we find a shared conviction while heimarmene certainly exists, it only enslaves the Other, not the members of the group with whom the author himself identifies. 

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